Tried capture once, version 4.3, never again, after conversion the colours seemed flat,now use CS3, Photoshop is the Daddie,
but a few months back i was standing next to a young lady purchasing her
1st Nikon DSLR, and the 'expert' at Jessops gave it the Nikon Spiel when she asked about shooting in RAW,"to get the best blah blah blah Nikon capture NX."

I don't use it, although I've heard very good things about it. I keep meaning to trial it...

Right now I just pull the NEFs directly into Aperture, and I think Aperture will always be at the center of my workflow. So unless Capture can actually modify exiting NEF images without a format change (meaning saving the changes as NEF rather than as a TIFF, PNG, etc.) it's somewhat difficult to see exactly where it'd fit in. I could see using it as a pre-processor, if that makes sense - but I'd still want the flexibility to do RAW-level adjustments in Aperture.

I use Nikon Capture and find it's interface quite awkward to use. However, the program seems to take advantage of Nikon camera features far better than any other 3rd party application (includes Aperture, Lightroom etc) and for me it is far quicker to get the results I want. I do have to use something like Photoshop Elements though to use the healing brush and add borders for dust removal and the addition of borders.

I have read that to really get the best results out of your Nikon RAW images that you really need to use Capture NX. Is this the spiel coming from Nikon or is this an accurate statement?

If you are using a Nikon, are you using Capture NX?

Thanks,

Click to expand...

The main reason why anybody would use Capture NX is the fact that NX is the only software that actually reads the additional image-info that Nikon cameras place in their NEF/RAW files. If you set your colors to "vivid" in-camera, NX will display the image accordingly while all other RAW processors will discard that info and overwrite them with a standard profile. Other settings, like noise reduction etc. are also lost in NEFs.

I personally use Aperture and PS CS3 for image editing because I like to edit myself rather than having my camera do some pre-processing.

I have tried NX and found it quite nice for some tasks (e.g. easily and quickly changing the exposure of selected image areas) but I personally don't think it's worth the money (for me).

I have NX loaded into my Mac Pro but for the most part I use Aperture or occasionally CS2 (haven't gotten around to updating to CS3 yet). The once or twice that I took a look at NX I was not comfortable so backed off.... For me, Aperture fits the bill 99.95% of the time.

I find Lightroom better because of its organizational features. If I need full use of in-camera optimizations, I just shoot JPEG and put that into Lightroom, but I've been almost all raw lately and everything seems as nice as ever.

I feel Capture NX is a terrific product. On my Mac Pro, it is very fast and is a big improvement over NC 4.4. NX is a little slow on my powerbook.
I believe that NX processes RAW files better than ACR and I love the control points.

Going from NEF to JPEG between Adobe Camera Raw from CS3 (ACR,) Aperture (APR) and Capture NX (NX,) I see a pixel shifts, with NX and ACR being fairly close (probably a pixel difference,) and APR shifting things right a few more pixels. Doing white balance with each of the NEFs produced different results- though I may have been off in my WB point selection between images.

Contrast was different, likely due to ACR settings. Overall, I thought the NX JPEG was more "true" and the ACR JPEG was next. APR's rendering was disappointing compared to the other two, and I'll probably stop using it for JPEG conversion unless I can tweak the settings to make the results better.

Zooming in to 500% there were clear differences in details, though I'll have to play with sharpness settings to be confident of the results.

When I'm near a photo printer, I'll probably do a print-from-NEF test as well as test the TIFF converters of each program. This may change my workflow if I find I have to import to NX, then export out- I haven't checked Bibble Pro yet, but it's going to get tested too and then I'll figure out at what point I'm going to have to do wide angle lens correction.

Methodology:

I simply made three copies of the same NEF file, opened one in each converter, used a wall to set a white point, saved to maximum JPEG, then opened the JPEGs in Photoshop, turned two of them to layers and clicked on and off the view for each layer to compare them two at a time. Then I zoomed in to 100% and 500% and compared the details.

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